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Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Free round trip flights to San Jose on Southwest!

I just booked us 2 free round
trip flights on Southwest Airlines for a wedding we will attend in San Jose in
November 2015.It’s a great feeling to
have enough rewards points to be able to travel almost anywhere at
anytime.I like to regularly share how
easy it is to redeem credit card rewards points towards free
travel.Here’s how I did it.

Once we determined our travel
dates, I started looking on Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, and Virgin
America to see which airline offered the best redemption of points from Orange
County (SNA) to San Jose (SJC).Chase
Ultimate Rewards points transfer to Southwest Airlines (if you have a Chase
Sapphire Preferred, Ink Plus, or Ink Bold credit card).Citibank ThankYou points transfer to Virgin
America (if you have the Citibank Premier or Prestige credit card).Both cash price and points redemption for the
flights we wanted were cheapest on Southwest.

Each one-way flight on
Southwest would have cost $102 for a
total of $408 ($102 x 4 for me and
my wife).

The same one-way flights cost
5,724 Rapid Rewards points and $5.60 for a total of 22,896 Rapid Rewards points and $22.40.

Flying on American Airlines
would have cost 50,000 miles.Flying
with Virgin Atlantic would have cost 16,188 elevate points, which converted
from Citibank ThankYou points would have cost 25,900 points (1,000 ThankYou
points = 625 Virgin elevate points currently). Also, Virgin Atlantic flies from LAX (Los Angeles) to SFO (San Francisco), not exactly the airports we want to depart from or land in.

We
used Chase Ultimate Rewards points towards our flights since it gave us the best redemption value of our points.

I don’t normally carry a
large balance of Rapid Rewards points.I
usually transfer my Chase Ultimate Rewards points into the Southwest program
last minute as needed.Transferring
Chase UR points to travel partners is extremely fast and easy.I just logged into my account at www.ultimaterewards.com.Then I selected 23,000 points to be
transferred into my Southwest Rapid Rewards account.

The points were transferred to my Rapid
Rewards account after I re-logged into my account.

Once I had enough points in
my account, I booked the flight right away.In my experience, you should book your award travel as soon as you are
absolutely sure about your travel plans.Prices seem to always go up.By
redeeming 22,896 points and $22.40 towards this flight, we saved $385.60 ($408 - $22.40)!